


Made Of Star-Stuff

by MirrorDaltokki



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dead People, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Smut, F/M, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:01:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29237250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirrorDaltokki/pseuds/MirrorDaltokki
Summary: You do not remember your name.But he can't remember his dead wife's face, and that makes it extra confusing.He's a king from a nation lost to the ages, sold to try to bring his dead wife back to life.You're a dead woman stuck in a spring of weird magic water, spending your eternity counting the stars and collecting souls.You've got all the time in the world to make him quit confusing innocent women with his dead wife and move on in the grieving process instead of trying to bring about the end of days. After all, the end of days is zero percent conducive to enjoying your lazy undead life.
Relationships: Viego (League of Legends)/Reader, Yorick Mori/Reader
Comments: 17
Kudos: 60





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orangecrushcrushcrush](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangecrushcrushcrush/gifts).



> Here we go again with this madness. We're having another trade. And I get to make a whole new tag just to make it happen. This reader-insert can be considered an author-insert if you feel like she's too angy but you want to enjoy the story anyway.
> 
> “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”  
> ― Carl Sagan

It's cold.

Not the kind you can spend comfortably curled up on your couch with a cup of tea and a good book, toes curled up in your fluffy socks. This is the kind of cold that seeps into your bones, settles in your heart, sits heavy and dark with an unending malaise. It's ice in your veins that turns time against you.

You float in glowing black and blue, an infinite void that spreads farther than your mind can comprehend.

The stars are wrong.

You know the revolution of the celestial sphere, the names of constellations, the way light still reaches you from stars dead long before you drew your first breath. But these are not the same. The nebulas that birthed these stars are not the ones you remember when you close your eyes.

If you turn your head, weighed down by endless eternity that drips from your hair, you can see the ruined shell of a civilization that is not your own stretching out from the edges of the void.

But that does not matter.

Here, all that matters is the cold darkness.

You sleep because it is easier to face than death.

You do not want to wake up.

Sleep is death without commitment.

You have to wake up.

It's cold, but that doesn't bother you.

You sit at the edge of a bottomless spring, legs curled up under you as you trail your fingers in glowing teal and turquoise water that defies your understanding. The water is mist beneath your fingertips, a warm vibrancy that pulses with life. It feels strange, almost as if the water itself is _fond_ of you. The spring all but sings when you put your hand in it, then goes silent and sad when you distance yourself from it.

Normally, this sort of thing would make all the melanin in your body nope out of this.

But this is different.

It wants to tell you something but doesn't have the words to do it. So you teach it your words and it tells you its story in return.

You don't know why, but you feel like you have all the time in the world. Eventually, your hand is not enough. It's so cold here, but the spring is warm and it _loves you_ more than it knows how to say.

Slipping into the cradle of the spring is easier than breathing. You know that it will not hurt you just as well as you now know the names of the stars whirling overhead in their eternal cosmic patterns.

It's a quiet eternity beneath the glowing mists.

You could sleep here forever.

There are ghosts that wail at the edges of the spring, deep within the ruined buildings that defy reality and the rules of physics, and you are not afraid of them. If anything, you pity them. Poor souls adrift and alone with no one to talk to. The spring tells you their names and the stories of their lives and ends.

You call them to you.

You tell them to _shut the fuck up and go the fuck to sleep_.

The spring is confused.

You are awake.

This is Hell.

You are dead.

This pisses you off.

After standing in the shallows of the spring and screaming obscenities at it for an indeterminate amount of time that makes the weaker ghosts shrink away from the force of your _seething rage,_ the spring rather helpfully begins to explain some things. This is, it turns out, not Hell or any kind of afterlife. It's close enough to offend you.

The spring thinks you should just go back to sleep.

The spring can go fuck itself.

But... a nap can't hurt.

It probably says something about you that you prioritized the names of stars over what had become of you.

The stars turn overhead enough times that you can recite their names from memory. You know the names of the ghosts that wail at the edges of the spring, a ceaseless and everchanging tide that ebbs and flows with each star you count, full of the stories of people who have long since turned to dust.

You don't actually care to know the minutiae of each ghost's life.

They get two minutes each, and even you know that's not enough time to tell a stranger your life. But two minutes is a _kindness_ , not an obligation. For all their whining and crying, you do still feel kind of bad for them. Some of them don't remember enough of themselves to tell you two minutes worth of their lives, and those are the ones you legitimately feel terrible about being so cruel to.

The ones that have forgotten are the first you let walk into the spring. Maybe if they're surrounded by the shreds of memory and knowledge you've started shoving wholesale into the creepy mist water they'll figure _something_ about themselves out. You don't know. You're not a licensed professional at whatever this is. Frankly, you're not even sure if it is possible to get a license in... soul to memory water transfers. Or whatever the hell you're doing.

The spring seems to like it.

And that makes your death a little less shitty.

It isn't possible to stay in the Shadow Isles without changing or being changed by them.

You are not immune to reality.

You don't notice how long it's been since you've eaten or drank until a ghost whisper-screams about how it was once a chef at a king's high table. Huh. The weird misty spring water quenches any thirst you might have had, but food? Food is a complexity you've not tried.

The next ghost is sent on a mission to find you something to eat in exchange for the story of its life and eternal slumber. You have no idea why the spring only lets ghosts you allow to sink into its glowing waters, but you are not about to complain when it gives you a ridiculous amount of leverage.

It returns with an orange. Or at least what you _think_ is an orange under all the spikes. Your claws crack it open just the same. It tastes sour, and you throw it aside.

Parts of you are damn near see-through but you've come to grips with it. Your entire left arm flickers in and out, and sometimes if you shift just right you can see the shape of your bones beneath the glow. Phalanges and metacarpals sparkle like the finest jewels, and sometimes you wish you had a mirror to see what you've become.

The Shadow Isles change you based on what you believe and how you think. You who dream of stars, you who sets the dead to rest and hears their lives before they fade away into the spring, you who do not belong.

You have been here long enough to study their stars and find them wanting. You search for the belt, the familiar pink of the Messier 42 nebula. Where is the Horsehead, rearing its dark head against Orion's greater glow? There are no auroras here, no constellations you can trace with the tips of your fingers. And what you cannot find in the Shadow Isles is what you become.

Like calls to like.

You long for the stars, and so you have become one.

There is a man with a shovel standing in front of your spring, surrounded by shambling corpses and wailing whisps, but he himself is not dead. He reaches for you, this behemoth of a man, and you laugh.

You call to his dead, the horde around him that desires his salvation.

And you put the noisy fuckers to bed where they belong.

He does not know what to make of you, but he tells you his story. You can hear his heart beating in his chest, noisy and so out of place in the quiet cold of your spring. He is of the living and you are of the dead. You have time to let him speak.

His name is Yorick, a simple monk who roams the Isles in the hope of bringing salvation to the dead. He wields their power in hopes of ending the blighted curse that holds this place in its sway.

It's very dramatic.

You don't care.

Yorick does not know where to look or how to address you. You suppose it is probably because he is a monk and you are very naked. He offers you salvation, because you are dead and that is all he knows how to do. Alas, poor Yorick, so alone. He calls you a majesty, a queen of the damned and dead, clutches the amulet at his neck as if that will save him.

You laugh. It's cute how he doesn't know what to do with himself when you stand up. He has to look down, you're too short for him to do anything else. You're pretty sure he wouldn't know what to do with the handfuls of breast you haven't bothered to hide behind your glowing nebula curls.

It's not hard to feel bad for him. Poor fucker hasn't had a peaceful conversation in ages. Then again, neither have you.

"Death is not to be feared, your majesty."

You stare up at him, jaw clenching. "No. But it is something to be learned from." Your arms spread out wide to indicate the length of your supposed queendom and you're disappointed to see him roll his eyes skyward faster than you can blink. Damn, fine then. "You've paid the toll. Get the hell out so I can go back to sleep."

After he is gone, you realize that perhaps you should not be naked as the day you were born if people here were going to be running around calling you a queen. Exactly what you are a queen of is beyond you. Maybe your spring is something important. Since you've been there, the misty waters have turned to a strange reflection of your worst glowing bits, twisted flowers and plants growing around it. The death throng beyond the furthest edge of growing things; it's almost as if they are terrified to enter your territory without asking first.

Good, the dead comprehend the concept of public and private property.

"You! Really loud fuckwit. Bring me something to wear that fits and doesn't look like vomit and you can skip the line."

You suppose your spring is out of place, a little spot of starry pinks and cyan smack in the middle of the dead teal and turquoise. Well. If that makes you a queen in the eyes of the only living person you've seen since you've been here, you should try to look the part.

The more of your half-ghost, half-person body you can cover, the less likely the monk will flee when you try to talk to him. You would _really_ like to talk to someone who isn't trying to high-speed babble out their life story. He's still alive, and you know better than anyone that he will get infinitely less interesting the moment he dies.

"You're shitting me." Well, this is what you get for sending ghosts to ruins in the search of clothes. It takes a moment for your claws to get around the concept of laces and stays, but you don't have to worry about breathing in a corset when you're _already dead_. The goal here is to look respectable and cover all your bits, hold up your boobs, and finally stop worrying about your ghost limbed skeleton legs sinking into the ground because you can't see your fucking toes.

You look like you're two seconds away from being sacrificed to the Phantom of the Opera, white dress and all, but you like the black vest with shiny silver toggles one of the smarter ghosts that still has _fingers_ finds for you. Very military, much swallowtail. It makes up for the fact that you can't wear shoes because you've got fucking claws for toenails now and all you can wear are stockings with the toes cut off. You have to roll up your sleeves to your elbows to keep your starshine greatness from burning a hole in the ancient fabric.

That ghost gets a kiss, a real one with tongue and everything, for its two whole designated minutes before you let it slip away into the pink mists for its eternal rest.

A long time ago, you were kind of bothered by the fact that you've either become Charon or some weird death spring spirit. But that was then, and this is now. The spring is you and you are the spring. You can still _leave_ , if you wanted to anyway, but you have so many stars left to learn the names of.

Yorick brings you the souls too damaged and weak for him to use to fight the Black Mist. You try not to think about how they all sound like children when you smack an overeager ghost or two away so the little ones can go take a nap in the pretty water. Sometimes, when they're extra scared and Yorick can spare a moment to wrangle your horde and his at the same time, you tell them the stories of the stars they point to in the night sky.

He seems much more comfortable with you now that you've got clothes on. Not comfortable enough for you to convince him that it's only neighborly to help you take it all off again, but can't blame a desperate girl for trying.

And in one horrible moment, the world _changes_. The sky seethes with black mists and you are screaming your defiance at it when it roils its way to _your turf_. Hell no. You did not spend weeks and weeks putting the dead to rest so you can _sleep_ for this shit to come and destroy your peace and quiet. Bitchslapping revenants, it turns out, works _so much better_ when you get mad enough to remember that you are the only desperate ghost who fancied themselves as less evil and more starshine and _pink means extra hurty_ when it comes to magic. Also, you have claws. Those help extra when putting your foot up the side of a motherfucker's face doesn't work as planned.

This is your turf and these things can fuck right the fuck off, swear to god you will _claw their eyes out_ when you find wherever those are on their heads.

There is a man striding through the Black Mists as if he owns them, the roiling madness parting before him like retainers before their lord. There are a few key things you take away from this man before he speaks, chiefly that he has a really fucking big sword and what the fuck is this edgelord doing.

Oh no, he's hot.

He also has a green glowy crown on his head, and ninety-nine percent of his body is not glowing. Except for his eyes. Those glow like you do: with the force of something great and terrible that should not be named. Well, you make it your business to know and catalog the name of every soul that makes up your power. You do not think this man cares enough to do the same.

You stop trying to shake whatever the hell thing in your hands is, dropping it like a hot rock in favor of staring at this man.

He has a hole in his chest. A. Hole. In. His. Chest.

This hole is literally _oozing_ black mist.

What the _actual fuck_.

He reaches his empty hand out to you, almost bored as he waves his fingers. You would wave back, but there's something _much more important_.

Your vision is trying to turn green. The same green of his sword, eyes, and crown. Some part of you is whispering that you should kneel in the presence of greatness, of the rightful ruler of the undead. But you are, if Yorick can be trusted (and he usually can when he isn't trying really hard to persuade you that it was ok for you to rest just as much as it is for the ghosts you put to rest), a queen in your own right.

A queen does not bow to a king.

Besides which, you have an aesthetic going on. That green is going to clash _horribly._

You rip that crown right off your head and crush it in one pink glowing fist. "No thanks."

He looks kind of adorable when he's confused. "You... Isolde?" It's like looking at a puppy. A really hot, edge lord puppy with a sword about as big as he is tall that he just waves around like it's nothing.

It takes embarrassingly long for you to clear your throat. Isolde. Sounds familiar. Somewhere in your galaxy of a brain, the name sparks a memory. "A tragedy... Neither you without me, nor me without you. Isolde and..."

"Viego. Don't you remember me, my dearest Isolde?"

You are pretty sure your name is not Isolde. But then again, it's been a really really long time since anyone called you by a name. Maybe this is your name. It's probably not. You would _remember_ a face like that. Probably in the biblical sense as well as the more common. But you don't remember this man.

Your silent contemplation is apparently a moment too long.

"Can you not find me in your heart?"

You snap out of trying to catalog names and faces to see if you know this man. Nope. You're not doing this today. If this Kingdom Hearts edge lord wants to say he knows you, good on him. But edge lords don't speak English like normal people do, so you're going to have to lead his brain on an exploratory adventure to get to common sense. "I know a lot of names, but I don't know mine. Not anymore. I'm called the Queen. Is my name in _your_ heart?"

He gives the most wistful sigh and comes closer, his sword lowered and the mist at his command staying decently away from the mist of your spring. You let him, stand as still as the grave while he cradles your face in one gauntleted hand. You can tell he's searching your face to see if you remember him.

You really don't. You've also come to the conclusion that your name is, sadly for what's left of your social life, definitely not Isolde.

"Are you the star that lights my path? My Isolde?"

Nope.

He frowns, eyebrows furrowing in his dawning rage. "My name is _not_ in your heart."

"Nope." You stick your hand, claws and all, into the gaping hole in his chest. "I'm _a_ star. But I'm not yours," you snarl as your claws catch and rip because the rules of sparkly pink magic will not be defeated by some ghosty edge lord who lost his girlfriend and _clearly_ doesn't need her if he can't remember what she looks like.

Viego, Edge Lord Supreme, does not die. He doesn't even have the decency to catch on fire. Instead, he flinches away with a mournful cry that would normally make you feel bad if he wasn't confusing you for his girlfriend. He retreats into the mist like he was never there, the black awful roiling away while he goes to recover from the indignity you have suffered upon his edgy little heart.

Seriously. Who just forgets what their girlfriend looks like?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One Robert Frost quote to go.
> 
> The adventures of angy!starlady continue!
> 
> There’s... uh... sort of smut in here? Enjoy it while it’s there.

The man with the hole in his chest keeps coming back.

Oh, you're normally super thrilled about having company these days that can hold a meaningful conversation with you instead of just treating you like some neon light Day-Glo edition Lady of the Lake for dead people. That company is pretty much limited to Yorick these days because those white-cloaked religious people do not seem to like stopping to chat and the _talking tree_ spends more time than you're comfortable with trying to put its roots in your spring. Another person showing up to talk to you should be the _greatest thing_ in your unlife.

It is not.

Viego does not want to talk so much as he does want to try to make you cough up the _shards of his wife's soul_ that he claims you have absorbed into the questionable muddle that is now your nebulous being.

He brought a magic zweihander from _literally the depths of the afterlife_ to try to carve said shards out of your undying corpse.

You liked the two fabulous white-cloaked people with the guns and the extra willingness to leave you to your own devices better. They said hello, please, thank you, asked how your day was going, and if you needed anything to make your struggles on the Isles better. They only pointed their magic guns at you for the first five minutes of conversation, and now they pretty much just stop by when they feel like being religious and soul-saving.

They keep asking you if you can help them stop the Ruination and you just laugh yourself sick every time.

Viego just liked to talk about the dumbest shit.

You can't tell if he's trying to recruit you for his undead army, convince you that you're actually his _wife_ without all her memories, or just kill you.

No matter what he's trying to do, you want none of it.

He brought a sword to the fight and the roiling mess of power and fog that is the Black Mist.

You brought enough _hate_ to ignite a star and the memory fragments of at least twenty martial artists from some weird wuxia country where it's apparently cool to be a furry.

The first time he almost kills you.

He straddles your waist, one gauntleted hand wrapped around your throat while you feel the edges of your vision going black as the void around the corners of your eyes. His face is a picture of rage and longing all at once, hands tightening as he leans down to snarl in your face.

"Give me back my Isolde."

You never had her in the first place.

Fuck, what does it say about your life that that was kind of hot?

You say that he _almost_ kills you because you can wake up to talk about it. Granted, you're halfway in your spring when you do manage to wake up. Someone has you in their lap, keeping you from drifting off to the bottomless depths. They're humming something, running too large and too warm hands through your astral curls, and you just want to snuggle into them forever.

You could. You're dead.

But they're warm, so very warm. And you're cold, colder now after Viego has ripped your unlife to shreds.

"Rest now, little queen. You have earned it."

You know that voice. It's Yorick, your dearest friend Yorick. Yorick who has borne a thousand souls upon his back and brought you the weakest of them with a tiny little smile. Yorick, who turns his back every time you leave your spring because he was raised to be _respectful_ and sometimes you can't be bothered with being kind to his delicate sensibilities. Naked women coming out of pools of water to come to say hello apparently cause some people to have crises of the faith. Who knew.

You relax.

Yorick won't hurt you.

Never.

But you are a star forge he has been stuck in an erratic orbit with and now he is so close to perihelion, a comet extinguishing with every heart-stopping moment. He is a finite existence, and you are a greedy void that will never tell him to stay away. You want to carve a place in his chest, right next to his heart, so you can feel the thrum of his heartbeat and let the heat of life coat the back of your throat, leech from him until you can pretend you’re alive.

You’re so cold.

So tired.

All you want to do is sleep, to slip into the welcoming eternity that is your spring and bring Yorick with you to keep his warmth with you forever.

But you know better than anyone else that he will only slip through your ghostly fingers if you try. Yorick is Yorick, and he belongs to no one but his god.

That doesn’t stop you from running your claws against him, the pads of your fingers desperate to feel his heart beat. You cannot sleep, cannot rest as he so dearly wishes you to do.

If you sleep, who will stop the likes of Viego from shattering the secrets and knowledge of the souls you’ve put to sleep in your spring? Who will hold the ghosts and wraiths of fractured children and tell them a bedtime story until they yawn and you tuck them in for a never ending night?

This pisses you off.

You didn’t ask for this.

You burn bright, ionized hydrogen magnetized by your own belief, the glittering light of shattered souls suspended for as long as you remain a member of the undead. Sometimes, you can see the tiniest fracture of pity in the corner of his eyes, and that will not do.

You pull yourself up from his lap, your short stature making it a struggle. He’s too tall and this will not do. As always, he humors you as you cradle his bearded face in your ghostly palms, your claws pricking gently against his skin as you tilt his face down. Obligingly, he bends down until your face is level with his and you can press a single burning kiss against his cheek.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” You are a shattered thing, you’ve come to realize, changed forever by the Isles. Gentle, always gentle as you cradle the finite wonder that is Yorick between your hands, you smile at him. “Who will keep you company if I pass on, hmm?”

You can feel the warmth of his breath on your face and you sigh when he grunts at you. “Once you pass on, I will join you in the beyond.”

Sometimes, Yorick is an idiot. You grin at him, reveling in what he does not say, and let the grin slide off your face by pressing a cold kiss on his lips. “I’m dead. I’ve got time.” He is your friend, the only one you have here, and you will not let him go for anything less than the apocalypse.

Or, what is more likely, that absolute fuckwit edge lord Viego and his black mist oozing ridiculousness.

Yorick doesn’t know where to put his hands, clenches them uselessly on the shore of your spring while you perch in his lap. He never does. Something about you makes him want to be respectful, probably his thought that you are the queen of some ancient land, and you really want him to stop. He is your friend, socially stupid though he may be. Friends don’t let friends fuck this sort of thing up.

You put his hands on your hips and snort. “You know, you can’t just go saying that to a girl. Gives us all kinds of ideas.” If you wiggle just right, flatten yourself against him so he can feel the press of ghostly flesh, you can usually make him roll his eyes up and pray. But not today.

Today you have learned a truth of the universe.

Viego killed you.

Yorick put you back together.

You’re going to fuck Viego’s undead existence up the next time you see him. In the meantime, you have a debt to repay that Yorick will never ask you for.

He is mostly alone on an island of fucked up ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and all manner of unsavory undead things. Has been since before you ever met him. You have met the living pair who hunt Viego and fully endorse the greatest marital relationship building exercise you have ever seen. The couple who kills undead together, stays together. But Yorick?

He has the ghosts he shackles to his side.

And he has you.

You roll your hips against his, half out of shattered memory and half out of sheer loneliness, straddling his waist with a satisfied sigh. You remember this, remember that you liked it, that it made your heart flutter in your chest, and that it made you feel alive in ways you will never feel again.

His fingers grip your hips and he starts to lift you off out of that annoying sense of dignity you want to shatter into pieces beneath your claws. You cling to him, scrabble against him in protest. “Little queen-“

“Please? Let me... just let me feel alive. Just this once.” He’s never heard you beg before, but then again he’s never had to hold the shattered pieces of your soul together and wait until your spring superglued you back into being. “Please...”

Yorick falters, and that is his first mistake.

You seize upon his hesitation and kiss him like you mean it, lick your way into his mouth until you can taste his breath and the sharp citrus of the orange he ate earlier. He has no idea what to do, poor man, and you come to a startling realization that he may honestly have never spoken to anyone but the raving dead. You tilt your head and hum when he starts running out of air. “In through your nose.”

You’re dead.

You have all the time in the world to teach a lonely man how to kiss until his partner sees stars.

And for just a moment, you feel your heart beat in your chest and you are _alive_.

Viego comes back long after Yorick is gone.

This time you are ready for him.

You were not ready for him.

But this time you last a little longer.

He has you pinned to the ground like a butterfly on a card, his sword through your middle while your claws scrabble in vain to try and pull it out. You are not, in fact, the ghost of a woman who fought for a living. You don’t know why you thought that incorporating the shattered memories of people who had would make you a fighter, but you tried.

Viego paces, runs his gauntleted hands through his hair and seems to be having what would be called a mental breakdown on anyone else. “I can feel my Isolde in you, but why won’t she come to me?”

If you were alive, you’d be hacking up blood by now. Instead, you part your lips in a snarl while the glowing ectoplasm leaks out of you and stains the black ground with the blood of a star. “Shoving your sword in women is not how you ask them for things,” you managed to spit out past your seething rage.

He stops, looks down at you like this is the first time he has ever seen you. “And what would you know?”

You laugh as much as you can around an enchanted sword. “You died a virgin, huh?”

In hindsight, maybe that’s not the best way to keep your head attached to your body.

The third time, he at least gives you the courtesy of actually acknowledging your existence.

“Good day, little star,” he says as he sketches you the most mocking of bows. But it is a bow nonetheless, some fragment of courtly manners coming through the madness, and you marvel at it enough to bow back. The crown on his head is not just for show, it seems, and maybe if he fucks you up enough he’ll remember that he was a king before his Isolde.

You can dream, as you manage to dodge the swing from his sword that should have neatly bisected you. Both of you pause, and then he swings his sword right back.

Yorick tastes like citrus far more than a man should. You are all for stopping scurvy, but there has to be a limit.

You don’t really care.

After all, he’s figured out just where on your neck he should bite to make you moan and shudder as you cling to him. Ten points to Hufflepuff.

The twelfth time, Viego bows before he speaks and actually converses before he whips his sword out to try and cut you down.

“Would you tell me, if you knew where my Isolde is?”

Your eyebrows crawl up your forehead. “I put the dead to rest, not drag them out for your convenience.” He knows that, knows it better than anyone. After all, his horde of weird dog things gets thinned out very quickly around your spring as they just can’t resist the temptation to drink the glowing water and sleep forever. You find it kind of funny that his black mist meets your pink mist and yours wins only because it chips away at his. “You know that.”

Viego has, in all of your encyclopedic and curated knowledge, never smiled at you before. The quirk at the corner of his mouth counts, and you revel in it. “Little star, little queen, I’ve razed nations for less. Give my Isolde back to me.”

You have a piece of Isolde now, brought to you by the unending legion that haunts this necropolis. You are literally refusing, over your dead body, to give it to him. What he’s doing isn’t healthy. This isn’t right. “Let her go, Viego. She’s already gone. You’re being a greedy bastard and you know it.”

The shattered bits of Ionian martial arts masters have begun seeping into your being. That is the only reason you manage to bring an arm up to block his blade with the bones on the back of your hand, push it away, and lunge forward to drag your burning claws across his face. Oh, this you can do. This makes sense now. You are prepared to bring honor to ancestors that aren’t even yours.

One v one, mano y mano. It’s Fite Nite Friday and you are about to cash him outside.

You manage to crow your victory for all of two seconds before he shoves his hand through your middle and pulls out glowing star stuff.

“Fuck.”

“Better,” he whispers as his head inclines gracefully in a nod. “Much better.”

He still leaves you to bleed out into the dirt until Yorick comes and throws you back in your spring.

Yorick doesn’t fit in your mouth, but that’s fine. You can work around it. A little lick here, a nibble there, the slow drag of your tongue up the shaft until you can suck the tip of him into your mouth. That’s about all you can fit. He doesn’t seem to care, not if the fingers he is trying so hard to curl into your hair are any indication.

He tastes like salt and citrus, thick and far too much for you to contain. It’s a good thing you don’t need to breathe. But you lick up the dribble from the corner of your mouth and watch him turn several interesting shades of red in succession.

Yorick tastes like life.

There comes a point where Viego simply sits on a rock at the side of your spring, far enough away that the mists cannot touch him and he can still watch you. He isn’t trying to remove you from the physical plane, his sword nowhere to be seen as he slumps over.

You shrug and go about your business.

Two minutes for a soul, now that his spectral monstrosities have started letting your usual throng of ghosts through. He looks thoughtful as he watches and listens. You, on the other hand, are just glad you’re not going to be springing a leak for a bit.

“Why do you do this?”

“Hmm? Do what?” You literally have no idea what he’s talking about, but the quiet sadness in his voice makes you more uncomfortable than you want to let on.

There’s an almost manic edge to his sadness, and you do not like it one bit. “Put them to rest. Why do you do it?”

You shrug and beckon another forward. “Someone should.” You turn your head and he looks zero percent satisfied with your half-assed answer. “Look. The Isles destroy souls. Here... I let them remember who they were before they move on. And I keep all of it. In there. Every single one.”

Viego is an edge lord, but he is not a stupid edge lord. “And where do they go after?”

You point up, one hand spreading out to let the bits of stars shimmer through your ghostly nebula body. “Up there. I count them. Name them. Remember them. Every single star.”

There is a long moment of silence while he thinks. “Up... there?”

You nod slowly and try not to let on the part where you think he’s lost his mind. “Every star is a soul.”

He doesn’t rip you apart.

You think the little edge lord might actually be growing on you.

“Which star is my Isolde?”

You spit out your orange chunk in shock. Holy shit, the extended metaphors seem to have worked. He has begun to equate you with infinite knowledge on how the afterlife works. And that’s super, because you are pulling it right out of your ass. You don’t want to tell him that you have no idea how this actually works.

He waits, amazingly patiently, with his arms crossed behind his back. You’re both dead, you have time.

You wipe the orange juice off your chin and try you absolute best to look like you are some sort of queen of stars and death. By this point, you might be. You have no idea which star is his dead wife. Honestly, you’re not sure if it matters. “Why?”

“I want you to bring her back to me.”

Yup. You saw this coming a mile away. Someone finally pieced it together that you are made of stars because you are made of souls, and if you can keep coming back to this mockery of life then you might be able to do it for someone else. You really, really, don’t want to. Dead people are loud and annoying and you will never get to sleep again if you do this.

“No. I can’t. I put them in, they go up. I can’t pull them out. That’s not how this works.”

_Fuck_.

You really thought you were past all this ‘kill the star lady’ nonsense.

At least he did you the courtesy of cutting your head off and giving you a relatively painless death.

Again.


End file.
